QUESTIONS FOR JOHN PODHORETZ; The Legacy

Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

Published: December 9, 2007

You've just been named the next editor of Commentary, which became the voice of the neoconservative movement in the '70s under the stewardship of your famous father, Norman. Did you always want to be the editor of Commentary? I never wanted to be editor of Commentary, at least not after the age of 7, when children seem to think, largely because of fairy tales, that they ascend to the position their parents hold upon their parents' death.

But you did get into the magazine field early on. In 1995, you were among the three founders of The Weekly Standard, which is snappier than Commentary and quickly surpassed it circulation-wise. In the '90s, the Clinton years, conservative magazines exploded. The classic rule of thumb is that if you are an intellectual ideological magazine, you do better in opposition than you do if your views are reflected by people in power.

Right. In the Bush years, left-leaning publications like The Nation and The New York Review of Books have flourished. Do you read either one? I look at The New York Review of Books. It's what it has been for 35 or 40 years, which is a highly sophisticated vehicle for anti-American self-hatred.

What do you make of writers like Eric Alterman, who have criticized your appointment as an act of cronyism, which goes against the conservative belief that jobs should be awarded on the basis of merit and not affirmative action? That's a very personal thing. Twenty years ago, I refused to shake his hand.

Why is that? Shouldn't you make some pretense of civility toward your fellow writers? I think making a pretense of civility toward Eric Alterman is like making a pretense of civility to a scorpion.

Small magazines used to be associated with lofty ideas, but I wonder if ideas and visions have shrunk in our time into mere political agendas. If you're asking me whether there has been intellectual degeneration in our time, the answer is no. There was plenty of substandard thinking even in the precincts of Partisan Review.

But these days we have commentators and talking heads instead of public intellectuals. There were always commentators. ''The David Susskind Show'' had them.

When Commentary was founded in New York in 1945, it was published by the American Jewish Committee. What, exactly, is its intellectual mission? The operating editorial philosophy of the magazine from the beginning was that it was possible to be a full member of the Jewish community and to be an American in every way, shape or form.

Is that message less urgent now since Jews have become so fully a part of American life? Not at all. You have Muslim youth rioting in the suburbs of Paris; you have a leader in Iran who is explicitly vowing that a homeland for almost six million Jews will be wiped off the face of the earth; you have a higher state of potential existential threat to Jews around the world than has been the case since the death of Hitler.

You are referring to the threat that American conservatives and various others attach to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the subject of your father's recent book, ''World War IV.'' It was his first best seller!

I see he has signed on as a foreign-policy adviser to Rudy Giuliani's campaign, and you, too, are backing Giuliani for president. That's coincidental.

You're also the film critic for The Weekly Standard. Do you see any paradox in being a conservative who revels in pop culture? Not in the least.

But don't social conservatives argue that movies and television are destroying the morals of today's youth? Some do, and they are wrong. Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change.

Your father presided over Commentary for more than three decades. Do you think you will last that long? Only if geriatric medicine improves.
INTERVIEW CONDUCTED, CONDENSED AND EDITED BY DEBORAH SOLOMON